Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Attrition

    I should be annoyingly happy right now. I’m doing another book festival this weekend, and the day after I’m off to London for the British Book Awards where I’m shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year – quite exciting given that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to read my book, let alone enjoy it. And there are some other things I can’t tell you about yet that are even more fun.

    All things considered, I should be a Tigger, bouncing around with excitement and driving everybody around me up the wall. But I’m not. Instead, every day feels like a slog and it’s getting harder and harder to stay positive. And that’s because every single day since I came out as trans, I’ve been subject to a war of attrition waged against trans people by bigots and their friends in the press.

    That’s over six years now. Six years of the same old slurs, the same old “just asking questions”, the same long-debunked statistics and long-debunked talking points. And yet it never stops. Just yesterday, The Observer let Sonia Sodha write her weekly column about how anything bad in the news – in this case, the police arresting republican protesters at the Coronation – is all the fault of trans people. It’d be funny if it weren’t a weekly occurrence not just in the Observer but in pretty much every other paper too. The Daily Mail alone is currently running over 100 anti-trans articles a month, up from 6 a month in 2013. The Times, The Herald, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, The Express and others appear to have full-time anti-trans columnists now.

    It’s relentless, and of course it has an effect in the streets: according to the Home Office, anti-trans hate crime has risen from under 500 cases in 2011/12 to nearly 4,500 in 2020/21. I have no doubt the next set of figures will be even worse.

    The constant flood of bad news and of anti-trans talking points across what feels like every single media outlet has a debilitating effect on people, to the point where some of the highest profile trans people I followed when I first came out have abandoned social media: blocking bigots is a constant game of whack-a-mole, a massive time sink and a huge drain on your mental health.

    Which is the point. As the late Toni Morrison famously said about racism, its function is distraction.

    It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing”.

    Reflecting on Morrison’s words, author and former TV reporter Aminatta Forna writes on the Luminato Festival website:

    The very first time I read these words, I knew them to be true. I was in my late twenties, working as a television reporter. I was being pushed and resisting being pushed into reporting the same story, over and over – the story of white people’s, specifically, British white people’s racism. At first I regarded this, at least in part, my duty. It didn’t take long for the hidden fallacy to reveal itself. I was being asked to explain, not to black people who knew plenty, but to white people who I was being asked to pretend were oblivious to the fact of it. 

    At a time where in the US trans people are having their healthcare removed, their right to exist in public removed, the safety of their children threatened, the press is full of “are trans activists too unreasonable?” by writers pretending to be oblivious to what’s happening. And with the architect of that cruelty Ron DeSantis greeted like a god by UK equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who DeSantis says wants to emulate what he’s doing in Florida, these endless articles and social media posts are deliberate distractions.

    I’ve written many times that the line between anti-trans and anti-semite is often very blurry; some of the highest profile members of the anti-trans movement, and some of the highest profile anti-trans books, claim that “transgenderism” is a Jewish conspiracy. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of Sartre’s comments about anti-semites:

    “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

     

  • Wars on woke don’t work

    The local election results demonstrate something we’ve seen in other countries, such as Australia: using a “war on woke” as your election strategy is a sure-fire way to be rejected at the polls.

    Byline Times:

    As the nation’s leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the Byline Times in an interview this week, “If you look at the long term trends, anti-woke views are becoming less and less common”.

    “You are chasing a declining zeitgeist, because in the end, one of the reasons why ‘anti-woke’ folk are so upset is because certain things that once upon a time nobody questioned, like the idea that same sex relationships are not a good idea… are no longer commonly held views.

    “On this whole argument about diversity, attitudes have shifted and they have shifted in a ‘woke’ direction.”

    The Sunak Tories are trying to roll back the clock, taking the party back to before the David Cameron “hug a hoodie” era to the nasty party of Michael Howard, and by doing so they’re swimming against a demographic tide: as Dr Natasha Kennedy writes on Twitter, demographics are moving the electorate in a less right-wing direction, something “that will only accelerate as the first postwar baby boom starts dying of old age in larger numbers in the second half of the decade while the 2008 mini-boom joins the electoral register in 2026”. The clock is ticking, and right-wing xenophobia in mainstream politics’ time is nearly up.

    Not that you’d know that from the press. But the press is facing its own demographic time bomb: the typical Daily Express reader is 69, and with its circulation down 19% year on year its future clearly isn’t very bright. The Daily Mail (average age 56) is down too (11% daily, 12% for the Mail on Sunday); other newspapers’ figures are so appalling they no longer publish them. The (Glasgow) Herald last published statistics in 2017, when it had 28,900 readers; in 2020, The Scotsman was down to 14,417. Given the ageing demographic of these papers’ readers, it’s probably tasteless but fair to say that a few hard winters could kill the print versions off entirely.

    Some, like cockroaches, will survive: the Daily Mail has been very successful in appealing to terrible people globally via the internet, and that’ll no doubt continue long after the print edition dies. But the press and the Tories’ war on woke is a short term strategy that can only be effective for a very short period of time: they’re swimming against a tide that will eventually sweep them away.

  • 10,000 smoking guns

    One of the leading organisations fighting against women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s existence is the American College of Pediatricians, a right-wing evangelical lobby group that pretends to represent the medical establishment. The organisation has accidentally leaked over 10,000 documents, many of them damning evidence of its hateful, unscientific bullshit – hateful, unscientific bullshit that’s been at the heart of media coverage of abortion and trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic by journalists too incompetent, compromised or malevolent to look beyond the press releases.

    Wired magazine:

    The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.” 

    It’ll be some time before full details emerge but what we’ve seen so far confirms what was already apparent: the ACP is a hate group pushing pseudoscience such as “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, an entirely made-up term from a debunked study of anti-trans activists by an anti-trans activist; its goal, as Wired puts it, is to “lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender… returning America to a time when the laws and social mores around family squared neatly with evangelical Christian beliefs.”

    As ever, the influence extends across the Atlantic. Don’t hold your breath for an exposé in the UK press, let alone a mea culpa.

  • Sparkling transphobia

    Another good piece by Vice: “Gender Critical” feminism isn’t feminist. It’s just transphobic

    If you read the news, it’s easy to think that gender-critical thinking is the dominant mode of British feminism. That can be terrifying for trans and non-binary people, especially when we are increasingly bombarded with transphobic headlines; an IPSO report in 2020 found there had been a 400 percent increase in coverage of trans issues in the previous five years.

    …Gender-critical feminists may have the powers that be and the far-right, but they haven’t persuaded other feminists. 

    I don’t like the term gender critical feminist, because like intelligent design or race realism it’s an attempt to rebrand the unpalatable to make it acceptable (and like those framings, it’s repeated by journalists who aren’t doing their jobs properly). There’s nothing critical or feminist about reinforcing patriarchal gender roles and trying to roll back to the clock on equality.

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon.

    The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the so-called mainstream have merged to such an extent means that when they all focus their attention on something, the effect is especially devastating. And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation. 

    …The relationship between the anti-vaccine and anti-trans movements makes logical sense, in that they both farm a specific suspicion of science and mainstream medicine. More subtly, both the anti-vaccine and anti-trans worlds also try to weaponize regret, sowing fear that a medical choice might go irreparably wrong.

    …This sort of explicit instrumentalization of conspiratorial ideas is the direction, it would seem, in which things are heading. Demonizing trans people is proving popular because it has political and social utility for so many different people, from Substack to the hall of Congress, from increasingly popular podcasts and the guests they can’t seem to give enough time to to parents confused, as parents always are, by the way the world has changed since they were young.

  • The E stands for enemy

    The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely devastating. The EHRC’s own staff said that its politically motivated attacks on trans people were wrong in law, would remove trans people’s human rights and posed an existential threat to the EHRC’s continuing existence. The EHRC is supposed to protect human rights, but in its current incarnation it is clearly the enemy of marginalised groups.

    Trans Safety Network has more:

    The Committee notes that the proposed amendments would ‘[undermine] the Commission’s long held position on trans rights’, which would pose ‘reputational risk’. The Committee also recommends that ‘the Board should consider the risk to our perceived political independence if we are perceived to be aligning with Government in the absence of robust evidence. This is a potential existential risk that such a perception could risk the Commission’s existence going forward’.

  • All the news that’s shit to print

    There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a minority group to stir up hatred against them. But the best example of the bad faith and malicious intent of the anti-trans press comes via The Telegraph, which breathlessly reports the story of an evil transgender woman robbing London Marathon runners of their rightful place: her participation was “wrong and unfair”, the paper says.

    The woman placed 6,160th.

    She also raised £37,000 for charity, but that detail might make Telegraph readers think slightly positively about her so of course it wasn’t mentioned in the piece.

    This story, like the US right losing its mind over a free can of beer being given to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney last week, makes it very clear what the beliefs of the anti-trans mob and their friends in the press are: trans people should not be allowed to participate in anything. To claim that a marathon runner placing 6,160th is depriving anyone of anything is simply malicious, malevolent bullshit.

  • Inhumanity

    Two days ago, Police Scotland Greater Glasgow posted an appeal for information about a missing woman, Amy Campbell. She hasn’t been seen since the middle of March and was reported missing on 4 April.

    As you’d expect from a missing-woman appeal, there are hundreds of comments. But those comments, by and large, aren’t expressing concern for her welfare. They’re misgendering her and posting anti-trans slurs because they believe she’s transgender.

    The worst aren’t the obvious bigots. The worst are the people trying to pretend their bigotry is just – you’ve guessed it – reasonable concerns: if the police were serious about finding Amy, they argue, they’d make it clear what genitals she had at birth. Many of the people posting this have the “gender critical” signifiers in their usernames or bios.

    Imagine seeing a police post about a missing woman and thinking the right thing to do is post “that’s a man” or an anti-trans slur. Imagine doing that and thinking the world is better with you in it.

  • Be joyfully you

    This Wired piece by Katherine Alejandra Cross is excellent.

    IT’S DIFFICULT TO overcome the momentum of algorithmic suppression, but our hearts and minds remain our own. We can defend them against colonization by hate-campaigners, who feed on our despair like some demon in a German fairy tale.

    What is needed instead of ceaseless portents of doom is a constant reminder of what we’re fighting for—especially for those trans people that rely on social media to have any sense of community at all, a point Branstetter returned to frequently. It’s especially important that they be able to see what trans thriving looks like. Especially our youth. As sociologist Tey Meadow put it over a decade ago, we need “inspiration for the kids who are still here … They need stories of teenagers just like them who are safe and happy now.”

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.